St Mary's in Exile Catholic Church, a Brisbane congregation founded fifteen years ago after facing excommunication for its progressive practices, is facing its biggest challenge yet: ageing. The church, led by ex-priest Terry Fitzpatrick, struggles with dwindling numbers and a lack of acceptance from the wider Catholic Church.
Members of the church choir and priest Terry Fitzpatrick during Sunday service for the St Mary’s in Exile Catholic Church . Photograph: David Maurice Smith/Oculi
But after a decade and a half in the wilderness, the rebel church is facing perhaps its biggest challenge yet – ageing.Beloved long-standing retired priest Peter Kennedy in his home in South Brisbane. He was removed from his position by the Catholic Church questioned the non-standard manner in which St Mary's conducted mass, including practices like allowing women to preach and blessing homosexual couples.
“They still create community. They come together to make sense of the realities of their lives,” he says. “One of the things about this community is that people have lived very rich and full and challenging lives, and many have experienced great hardship, great grief,” Clifford says. Just last year, St Mary’s was invited to use a church building in Brisbane’s north-west by the Jesuits and held a few Sunday services there in OctoberSeveral members of the St Mary’s community told the Guardian that all was set for the group to move to the inner Brisbane suburb of Auchenflower until a meeting between the Jesuits and the archbishop.
“What it is, it’s fear. It’s fear that if we come in there, their mob might go we like your liturgy. We don’t like this other liturgy,” Fitzpatrick says.In the heady decades of Catholic reform after the second Vatican council, St Mary’s in Exile didn’t seem so radical.But under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the movement was “crushed”, as the church swung back to the right, Fitzpatrick says.
Catholic Church Progressive Practices Excommunication Ageing Population Community Brisbane
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